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For these photographs I borrowed my friend’s camera, a 2006
Nikon D80, a mid-level consumer SLR. After taking these photographs, I
still don’t know quite how to work the camera, but
that’s okay. There’s a dial on top with an
‘M’ for ‘manual’ and two more
dials, one for aperture and one for shutter speed. I measure the light
using the long tested method passed on to me by my first employer, when
I was a photographic assistant almost 20 years ago; I lick my thumb and
hold it in the air, much like one would measure air-speed, and then
guess the exposure. It works every time, especially after the first
thousand tries.
Paulo von Borries, Studio Manager of California Design and Build LLC.
Recently I’ve designed and built a series of domestic
lighting, which will go on sale at fab.com in March 2012. I then
designed and built some more lighting, with which to photograph that
lighting. In fact, I designed and built both lighting systems, using
lighting that I designed and built. Whereas the domestic
lighting uses LED bulbs, the lighting which
lights the lighting uses flash guns, three Vivitar 285s,
which were purchased from
amazon. Both the domestic and photographic light sources are focused,
color corrected and then diffused, as they would be in any photographic
studio, or on any film set or theater stage.
Vera Toon.
The Vivitar
285 is the sister flash to the 283, introduced in 1970, which became
the number one professional and enthusiast flash unit in the world and
remained in production for thirty years. Every professional used to
have one or more of these workhorses in their camera bag, as a back up
to their more expensive gear. They are inexpensive and unassuming to
look at, the most basic looking of standard flash guns that might be at home on top
of any SLR camera. Just as Vivitar’s lenses were often less
expensive and higher performing than the competition, Vivitar flash
guns were uncannily powerful and reliable for their price tag.
Johnny.
As any professional photographer might tell you, an electronic flash is
required in the studio in order to freeze motion.
Incandescent lights are not nearly bright enough to allow short
exposures and/or narrow apertures. Also, the color is not daylight
balanced, which is not necessarily problematic for modern digital
cameras, but previously required a different stock of transparency
film, otherwise every picture would be deep orange, or deep blue,
depending on whether daylight film was used under tungsten light, or
tungsten film was used under daylight (or electronic flash which is the
same color as daylight). Negative film, designed for the amateur market, was not
sensitive to the color shift which could be altered in the print stage,
and also allowed for greater ‘latitude’ (errors) in
exposure.
Vera Toon.
It would seem to most people that daylight, incandescent light, or
almost any other artificial lighting, that whereas the hues of all
these various light sources maybe be subtly different, such as warmer
or cooler, they are still ‘white’ light and
therefore reasonably similar. In fact, fluorescent lighting renders all
photographs taken on transparency film a deep (and uncorrectable)
green, without a strong magenta filter placed over the lens. The
magenta filter would compensate the light color so that there would be
no hint of green (or magenta) in the photograph. Similarly, orange
(warm-up) filters or blue (cooling) filters could be used to compensate
for daylight and tungsten (incandescent) light respectively. The
subject of color perception is called colorimetry and the phenomenon of
color cast compensation by the human eye is called a metamerism. The
effect is only apparent when viewing objects illuminated by the light.
Jorge Montijo.
Modern digital
cameras correct for this phenomenon, it’s called
‘automatic white balance.’ It can be overridden in
many cameras, and a little bit of tinkering with the color/white balance
function will make the actual differences in the color of light far
more apparent. In everyday life, our eyes, much like digital cameras,
automatically correct for this color shift of the ‘white
point’ making every scene that we look at, even under
different light conditions, look more similar than they really are. Our
eyes compensate for color as well as brightness, and every light source
has its own unique color, as well as brightness level. Just as the
brightness of light can affect our mood and experience, so can its
color. The difference may be subtle, but critical, especially over time.
Burton Landhuis, Director of California Design and Build LLC.
There are artificial lights which most people will agree, are less
pleasant than others. Supermarkets, banks and offices are mostly green
fluorescent lighting and tend to make most people look less healthy
than they really are. Darkrooms, downtown bars and strip-clubs
frequently have red lighting which make everybody glow with health,
even at 3am. Sunlight is perfect, clearly; our only source of natural
light besides the stars. The orange flame of an open fire is
universally appealing, perhaps because it was so long ago that it
represented a major turning point in our history, when we could see
clearly on a starless and moonless night, keep warm, cook food and keep
predators at bay. A fireplace mimics the color of a sunset which most
of us find beautiful. Perhaps it’s because fire is a little
piece of the sun, the source of all our power which was otherwise so
far away, in the palm of our hand.
Burton Landhuis, Director of California Design and Build LLC.
I don’t know which of our senses could be described as our
primary sense, or even if we have one. It could be argued that touch
(tactioception) is our primary sense, or at least the one we had first.
It could even be taste (gustaoception), or one of our less obvious
senses like balance (equilibrioception) or temperature (thermoception)
but not smell (olfacoception) or sound (audioception) since
they’re carried by air. Rhythm is not an exclusive concept to
sound, and in all likelihood predates it. The same could be true of
music, harmony, frequency, pitch and tone. Our sense of rhythm might
not come from having a constant beating heart, but a beating heart
might come from an existing and underlying rythm of the universe.
Vision (ophthalmoception) is most definitely a major contender for
being called a primary sense, for which we need light. Our planet is
dark half of the time, and that is when we need artificial light.
Paulo von Borries, Studio Manager of California Design and Build LLC.
Thomas Edison
developed the first practical electric lighting system over a hundred
years ago, using incandescent light bulbs. These bulbs heat a metal
filament contained within a vacuum, or an inert gas, to prevent
oxidation which would quickly break the filament. The color cast of the
resulting light is orange, like a sunset or a fire, but white enough to
be able to view a broad spectrum of colors. The light comes from a
single source as it would a candle, which creates a high contrast
between the highlights and the shadows. To reduce the contrast and
soften the shadows a lampshade is used to diffuse the light; paper,
silk or glass are some of the traditional materials. The emitted light
takes on the texture and color of the material that it passes through.
Ask any traffic light or fire truck.
Jorge Montijo.
LEDs, or light emitting diodes,
contain semiconductors which emit
photons of specific colors depending on the configuration of the
semiconductor. They usually only emit colors of a narrow bandwidth, so
white
light can only be achieved by either by combining red, blue and green,
or by filtering a UV or blue biased LED with phosphors similar to those
in a fluorescent light. That means that unlike incandescent lighting
which has a consistent and pleasant orange cast, modern LED lighting
varies in color across the different manufacturers. Few, if any, have
produced an LED which achieves the same pleasant color as an
incandescent light. I wanted to find a way to make LED lighting at
least as enjoyable of an experience, as 40% of the western
world’s energy is consumed by
buildings for heating, cooling and lighting, and LED lighting consumes
10% as much energy as regular incandescent lighting.
Paulo von Borries, Studio Manager of California Design and Build LLC.
As I write this, I’m enjoying the light of my softbox. It feels a
little like a silent roaring fire. It’s powered by the same LED lightbulb
that is in every light fixture in my home and office. They’re
more expensive than incandescents but they will last 20 years without
needing to be replaced, and my lighting bills are reduced by 90%. I
have filtered the light so that the color spectrum is both neutral and
complete enough to see the true colors of the environment while still
being warm so that it’s pleasant to live with, day after
day. The light is then focused and diffused, which reduces glare
and increases clarity. All of the light is utilized and none
is wasted, much like insulating a house to save on heating bills or
fixing leaking pipes to save water.
     
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